The Tech Report has had a world exclusive sneak-peek of S3’s upcoming graphics card DeltaChrome. By judging from S3’s choices in designs, its card appears to be very similar to ATi’s Radeon 9700/9800 in many aspects.
The top model will compete with Radeon 9800 non-Pro and GeForce 5900 non-Ultra, according to S3 itself.
With 8 pixel pipelines and a core speed of 315 MHz, it without a doubt seems like the company has fill rate good enough to put up a good fight. What could prevent the card from gaining total success could instead be its relatively low bandwidth, as the card is equipped with merely a 128-bit memory buss (in difference to ATi’s and nVidia’s flagship models that has double the bandwidth).
It’ll be interesting to see what VIA/S3 and XGI have up their sleeves. If they manage to get their cards out before Christmas trade, we can expect a massive war of which company that will going to sell most solid Christmas gifts. Hopefully, this leads to price reductions that promote us consumers. Not the least, it could prove the two current graphics giants that they aren’t solely without competition.
Read more here.
